Religious Wrongdoings

by Logan Nakyanzi ("ABC News," February 14, 2001)

K A M P A L A, Uganda, Feb. 14 — Father Dominic Kataribabo's
house looked like any other under renovation — the work crew was busy fixing
the sewage system and had already raised the roof. Neighbors sat beside the
gate to the house and in the yard, watching children wearing rosaries pose for
a picture.

But last year, 55 bodies were pulled from the house — part
of a purge perpetrated by a Ugandan cult calling itself The Movement for the
Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God.

By some estimates, as many as 1,000 people were found
murdered by the cult across the country.

It was about this time last year that the cult started to
implode after the apocalypse failed to arrive with the New Year as predicted.

The cult's teachings were based on messages the leaders
claimed to receive from the Virgin Mary and Jesus.

They emphasized the restoration of the Ten Commandments and
urged members to confess their sins in preparation for the end of the world on
December 31, 1999.

But the end never came and questions were inevitably asked
of the leaders. Payments to the "church" by members slowed dramatically
until it was announced that the deadline for the end of the world had been
extended by the Virgin Mary.

March 17 was set as the "new" doomsday and people
arrived to pray. They were locked in a church and burned to death on the
pretext that the Virgin Mary would deliver them from the end of the world
"clothed in flames." In addition to the bodies in the church,
investigators found bodies of followers buried all over the country.

Church leaders, including Kataribabo, are still believed to
be on the run.

Churches Galore

Uganda has many cults, says newspaper editor Charles
Onyango-Obbo. Obbo is editor of The Monitor, a newspaper billed as Uganda's
only independent daily.

"Every small town has got a small church, small sect,
someone has set up shop there. There's much, much more than 200 [churches,
cults and sects]."

Obbo says the expansion of cults in Uganda is symptomatic of
the country's larger problems.

He said Ugandans faced frustrations with established
churches and the government because both had been unable to meet the needs of
people coping with multiple traumas dogging the country.

On the Up and Up

Despite being hailed as an up-and-coming power broker in
East Africa, Uganda is still reeling from years of armed conflict, political
killings, and AIDS. Most of its population is under 18.

For Obbo, there is a connection between Uganda's one-party
state and the growth of churches.

"A one-party state creates a vacuum and something will
fill it. Either some demagogue, some church … during Idi Amin's [dictator in
the 1970s responsible for the deaths of 300,000 opponents] time it was
football, it was sports, sports clubs became very big. And now we have a lot of
what you see, what we call cultural fundamentalism," Obbo told ABCNEWS.com.

Obbo said that until the lives of the average Ugandan
improved, they would continue to be attracted to churches.

"If you had political groups, if they were free, you'd
have competition for people's attention and time. You'd have a lot of programs
being sold to the people … other than churches."

An Intervention

The government, for its part, is trying to intervene when
churches begin behaving like extremist cults.

In August, a United Methodist Church was closed. Reportedly,
officials took action after learning parishioners were pressured into
abandoning medication and cosmetics to spend their days in all-day prayer
vigils in darkened rooms. And some "born-again" churches have come
under fire for holding "night prayers" for the same reason — the
potential for excess.

Bordered by Sudan to the north, Congo to the west, and
Rwanda to the southwest, Uganda has a habit of making headlines as the kind of
nation vaulting from one tragedy to another.

Perhaps the most recent spark for international attention
was an outbreak of the Ebola virus last year.

It was in this uncertain climate that the Ten Commandments
cult thrived and was able to convince people that the end of the world was
imminent.

William Tayeebwa, a reporter who covered the story locally,
says killings began when leaders panicked: Members sold their property and gave
proceeds to the cult with the understanding that the apocalypse was nigh.

"Nineteen-ninety-nine ends and they did not see the end
of the world. So then the people started agitating. 'Now what's happening? We
are supposed to go to heaven, we are not going.' And then it was clear [to cult
leaders] that these people were revolting and in order to bring down the
revolt, these people had to arrange for the end of the world," Tayeebwa
said.

Choosing the Right Path

Obbo breaks the religious spectrum in Uganda into three
groups. The older, established churches, the independent churches and the
alternative churches.

He says the established churches, like the Anglican and
Catholic churches, have found themselves stuck in a rigid format, unable to
compete with the smaller groups who are winning over their parishioners.

Even church leaders are jumping ship. Father Kataribabo, now
on the run from authorities as the the second-in-command of the Ten
Commandments cult, was a preacher in the Catholic Church and reportedly left
when he failed to be promoted at a pace he found acceptable.

"In the west of Uganda, very few members of that church
have been able to rise in the hierarchy of the church," says Obbo,
"so dissidents from that movement, like Father Kataribabo, then go and
say, 'there's nothing in this for us. If they cannot reward us, we must
organize ourselves.'"

By contrast, independent and alternative churches can hardly
find enough room to seat all their new members.

Kampala Pentecostal Church (KPC) and its Canadian preacher,
for example, minister from a former theater on a prominent hill in the middle
of the capital. Sundays it is packed to overflowing, the balcony filled and
parishioners out back watching the service on television monitors.

But Obbo makes a distinction between KPC and other newer
churches: KPC "targets middle class, successful, professionals. And it
talks about how to make money, how to find yourself a nice husband, nice wife,
how to have a happy time with your family, picnicking and things. So it's been
able to combine — it's almost got an ecumenical undertone to it. It's been able
to speak to people's material concerns, the bottom line, so to speak. And it's
also spoken to spiritual issues, in a very very modern sense.

"The Pentecostal Church has got its own thing, proper
church, air conditioning. So it's in a different league than the rest, the
majority of the other churches, which are very, very aggressive, which commit
miracles: The Miracle Center, The Healing Center, The Victory Center — these
are very aggressive churches."

And the miracles being advertised are attractive: Speaking
before a packed congregation at Redeemed of the Lord Evangelistic Church, one
preacher says she was cured of AIDS when she was "born-again."
Reverend Grace Kityo, from Faith Christian Churches, a sect of 50 churches he
helped found, says, "I've seen people who have been with AIDS delivered by
the Almighty power and now are free." He also claims he brought a boy back
from the dead.

At Kataribabo's house, like many gated homes in Uganda, the
walls of the perimeter fence are topped with broken glass. While the walls keep
out unwanted scrutiny, the cults sweeping Uganda continue to entice vulnerable
Ugandans with empty promises of a better life.